Wednesday, February 29, 2012

simultaneity 4.1: EWG in Nietzsche and Kafka

When Nietzsche came down from the mountains of Sils Maria in
1882 and wrote the first four books of the Gay Science, he was filled with a
rare, unifying vision that had sprung itself upon him and completely turned
around his mood. As any moraliste knows, the mood is a cognitive tool– it is by the mood that one judges certain
intangible but real changes in the world. No barometer is complex enough to
allow us to judge our historical moment, with its different forms of existence
that are setloose in the quotidian and
bump against each other as though in a fair; with its obsessions and routines,
its shifting matrixes of exchange, its speeds. Thus, Nietzsche wrote his book
with this mood like a muse on his shoulder, and revealed, shyly, like a great
secret, in the fourth book, his inspiration and great idea. It was of course
the doctrine of the eternal return, announced – as though balancing the
lightness of the title of the book – as the heaviest weight, das grösste
Schwergewicht.The dramaturgy here is
along the lines of the great philosophical coups de theatres, from Socrates’
death to Descartes’ dream: thus, it includes a demon.

“What if, one day or night, a
demon slinks up to you in your loneliest loneliness and says: your life, as you
live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again, and countless times
again; and there will be nothing new in it, and instead, every pain and
pleasure and ever thought and sigh and all the unspeakably smallnesses and
greatnesses of your life must return to you and everything in the same series
and succession – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees,
and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is
turned over again and again – and you with it, dust speck of specks!” [My translation]

The eternal return of the same enters the literature of the
late nineteenth century through many doors. Nietzsche’s is the most famous. In
the early twentieth century, it enters with a bit less gravity – in fact, as a
slapstick routine, performed by a po faced clown. The clown, here, is not
Chaplin but Kafka, the place is in an early letter to Felice Bauer, his future
fiancé, but the setting is surely Modern Times, the office version:

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.